Saying just enough
Last month, when everybody (and quite possibly their cat) was linking to the now-pulled (oops, apparently you can’t get away with putting up scans of an entire book) Bunny Suicides site, I probably saw two dozen posts along the lines of
Bunny Suicides : kinda morbid, but funny.
before I finally saw JWalk saying
In the past few days, I’ve been seeing links to Bunny Suicides everywhere. I just assumed it was a cutesy Flash animation, so I never bothered to check it out.
But curiosity got the best of me, and I discovered that this site contains a bunch of single-panel cartoons that depict various methods a rabbit might use to commit suicide. Using a DVD player is just one way.
Which of course is exactly what I’d been thinking, but he was the first person to actually sell me his link, not just assume I would buy it no matter what.
Today, I’ve seen at least a half-dozen links to JavaScript Triggers, and halfway filed it away as something to maybe look at, since I’ve got some JS posts I need to get out of my head. Then, Joe at Gadgetopia actually sold the link to me, explaining who wrote it and what it was about (okay, he had me at PPK, but the what part, using your own attributes to drive script attachment out of the HTML, would also have grabbed my attention).
Low effort linklogs, with a link and three or four words, or super-low-effort del.icio.us links with no words, do serve a purpose, and are far better than my usual “save it for later (where later means never)” model, but every so often, could you haul out an old-school weblog post, where it’s a link and maybe two sentences, that don’t assume I’ll absolutely follow every single link you post?
And if you design weblog software, could you please keep in mind just how valuable it would be if your editing pages and your default post structure actually encourage that sort of valuable posting, rather than encouraging an alternation between nearly no detail and essays with vast, unexplored, Stygian depths?
Heh. As Paul points out by putting us together with a pair of ”links and a few words,” Matt and I were saying nearly the same thing at nearly the same time.
There’s a certain irony about this post already having been linked to in del.icio.us four times (as of this moment). Admittedly, I did it out of amusement and orneryness, but then discovered that I wasn’t the first…
There’s also an advantage on the accessibility front for making descriptive links etc.
It’s far better on that score to have click here to visit the flibberty site instead of ”click here to visit etc. etc.”, partly because screen-readers and the like sometimes bunch all the links together, and you can end up with it reading ”here. here. here. here.” instead of actually knowing what it is you’re linking to.
But really well, it’s just a better way of doing things!
Actually, you should leave the ”click here to visit” part from your linked text. Kinda redundant, isn’t it?
No, because on accessibility terms it’s better to have the screen-reader or whatever saying ”click here for flibberty” rather than just ”flibberty”.
In that way it’s about making the links more intelligible for all. I’m not sure what the US’s Section 508 on Accessibility says about link text, but in the UK’s e-government accessibility recommendations, that’s the type of example given. Alternatively, I guess you could have a text like ”link to flibberty.com” - some screenreaders will read the link’s title attribute for more information, but not all of them do, so there’s some need (to my knowledge) to make sure the information goes as cross-platform as possible - at least until there’s a decent degree of standardisation amongst screen-readers etc.
I only recently discovered unobtrusive javascript. It seems good-enough for me now, but assigning behaviors using a custom attribute does useful in applying behaviors over similar elements.
Well, for me, this is one of life’s enduring mysteries. Why would anyone, given the choice, want to read (or write) anything other than ”essays with vast, unexplored, Stygian depths”?